It is obscure when exactly Great Britain first asserted sovereignty
over the territory; however, after France accepted British
sovereignty over the Hudson Bay coast by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), Great Britain was
the only European power with practical access to that part of the
continent. The Hudson's Bay Company, despite the
royal charter assigning only Rupert's Land to the company, had long
used the region as part of its trading area before the governance
of the North-Western Territory was explicitly assigned to the
company in 1859. The British made
virtually no effort to assert sovereignty over the Aboriginal peoples of the
area. In accordance with the Royal Proclamation of 1763,
large-scale settlement by non-Aboriginal people was prohibited
until the lands were surrendered by treaty.

11Dependencies of St. Helena since
1922 (Ascension Island) and 1938 (Tristan da Cunha)12Occupied by Argentina during the Falklands War of
April–June 198213Both claimed in 1908; territories
formed in 1962 (British Antarctic Territory) and 1985 (South
Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands)